Katana VentraIP

Jewish Museum (Manhattan)

The Jewish Museum is an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in the former Felix M. Warburg House, along the Museum Mile on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The first Jewish museum in the United States, as well as the oldest existing Jewish museum in the world, it contains the largest collection of art and Jewish culture excluding Israeli museums, more than 30,000 objects.[1] While its collection was established in 1904 at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the museum did not open to the public until 1947 when Felix Warburg's widow sold the property to the Seminary.[2] It focuses both on artifacts of Jewish history and on modern and contemporary art. The museum's collection exhibition, Scenes from the Collection, is supplemented by multiple temporary exhibitions each year.[3]

This article is about the museum on Fifth Avenue. For the museum in Battery Park City, see Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Established

Self-Portrait with Camera, 1930

Man Ray

Untitled, 1963–64

Eva Hesse

Jacob Israel Avedon portraits, 1969–73

Richard Avedon

Return of the Mariner, 1946

Adolph Gottlieb

Double Red Yentl, Split, from My Elvis series, 1993

Deborah Kass

Jan Pogorzelski, , 1893

Hanukkah menorah

Adam and Eve Driven From Paradise, c. 1896–1902

James Tissot

The Steerage, 1907

Alfred Stieglitz

Goldfish Vendor, 1928

Reuven Rubin

Old Man with Beard, c. 1931

Marc Chagall

Johann Adam Boller , Frankfurt am Main (Germany), 1706–32

Hanukkah menorah

from Adath Yeshurun Synagogue, Abraham Shulkin, 1899

Torah Ark

(1966)

Primary Structures

The Circle of : Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945 (1985)

Montparnasse

: Art, Truth, and Justice (1987)

The Dreyfus Affair

Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945 (1991)

Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities (1996)

Assignment: Rescue, The Story of and the Emergency Rescue Committee (1997)

Varian Fry

An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of (1998)

Chaïm Soutine

Voice, Image, Gesture: Selections from The Jewish Museum's Collection, 1945–2000 (2001)

Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002)

New York: Capital of Photography (2002)

Beyond the Myth (2004)[18]

Modigliani

: Sculpture (2006)

Eva Hesse

Action/Abstraction: , de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 (2008)

Pollock

Shifting the Gaze: Painting and (2010–2011)

Feminism

: Art and Magic (2010–2011)

Harry Houdini

: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) (2011)

Maira Kalman

Collecting and Modern Masters: The Cone sisters of Baltimore (2011)

Matisse

The Radical Camera: New York's , 1936-1951 (2012)

Photo League

and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats (2012)

The Snowy Day

/ The World Stage: Israel (2012)

Kehinde Wiley

: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 (2012)

Édouard Vuillard

"Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the " (September 14, 2012 – February 3, 2013)

Bodleian Library

"Sharon Lockhart Noa Eshkol" (November 2, 2012 – March 24, 2013)

Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television (May 1 to September 27, 2015)

": Modern Architecture and Design" (November 4, 2016 – March 24, 2017)[19]

Pierre Chareau

", Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922" (September 14, 2018 – January 6, 2019)[20]

Chagall

Exhibit from March 3 to August 13, 2023. Review in The New York Times. Review in The Wall Street Journal.

"The Sassoons"

Some of the museum's important exhibitions have included:

Programs[edit]

The Jewish Museum has a vast array of public educational programs which include talks and lectures, performances, hands on art making, group visits, specialist programming for visitors with disabilities, and resources for Pre-K-12 teachers.[29][30] Programming for visitors with disabilities can take a unique and special form, with exclusive access to the museum one day a month for a program like the Verbal Description Tour.[31][32] Participants are guided around sections of the empty museum by an art educator, who provides detailed, verbal descriptions of the art work, shares touch objects, and encourages discussion amongst the visitors. One participant described the ability to touch the art work as "...an honor, to be able to touch it. It felt like we were doing something so special, that other people can't do. So it actually creates an experience where you feel a connection to the art."[33]


Programming at the Jewish Museum caters for many different constituents, from live musical performances to events specifically curated for children, and families.[34] Events can be co-sponsored or in conjunction with other museums, particularly those located nearby on Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile.[35] Part of the goal of family programming is to help foster a younger audience for the museum, with Sunday being "family day", with a variety of activities on offer including gallery tours, free art workshops and parent-children storybook readings. Activities are designed to cross cultures, and explore subjects that can appeal to any race or religion, such as archaeological digs or an examination of color and impressionistic landscapes.[36]

Management[edit]

As of 2013, the Jewish Museum operates on a $17 million annual budget.[37] Under Joan Rosenbaum's leadership the museum's collection grew to 26,000 objects, its endowment to more than $92 million and its annual operating budget to $15 million from $1 million in 1981.[38] Rosenbaum chose to emphasize the Jewish side of the museum's identity, creating the permanent exhibition "Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey," while also mounting shows of modern Jewish artists such as Chaïm Soutine and contemporary artists such as Maira Kalman.[39] In 2013, the museum's board chose Claudia Gould, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, as its new director.[39]


In 2015 Kelly Taxter was named one of the top 25 female curators in the world by ArtNet.[40]

Jews in New York City

List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City

Official website

at the Jewish Museum website

"Current Exhibitions"

at the Jewish Museum website

"Past Exhibitions"

within Google Arts & Culture

Jewish Museum (Manhattan)